What is Beauty?

We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender.  Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in time. Each night we surrender to the dark and the world of dreaming where time is no more.  At birth we awaken and emerge to become visible in the world. At death we surrender to the dark to become invisible.

Awakening and surrender framing each day and each life.  Between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.

The ancients knew that all frailty and uncertainty was ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which  presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender. In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act; a  sense of completion and sureness. Is it because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such terrible crisis? Much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty.

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Our joy in the Beautiful is as native to us as our breath, a lyrical act where we surrender but to awake,
Now we want (and need) the experience itself, not the analysis or the membership card. Notions of self-improvement have become banal and wearisome.

Beauty offers us refreshment, elevation and remembrance of our true origin and real destination. It invites us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. We yearn for this order and coherence that Beauty brings, such brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. Hans-Georg Gadamer says, ‘'the experience of the beautiful ….is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be".

Beauty is not just a call to growth, it is a transforming presence wherein we unfold towards growth almost before we realize it. Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty.

from Divine Beauty:  The Intimate Embrace, by John O-Donohue